My Father, The Fiction
by Senka Milutinović︎︎︎As a remedy, as survival, my mother read, pouring into the pages. She read the same story with conviction, swatting away responsibilities and postponing meeting loved ones. Months passed by and her back grew wary of yet another day of sitting by her desk. Her torso bulged out of proportion and her hands grew sticky when they touched the page. Concerned, her friends worried she might just turn into cellulose, or worse, remain single.
9 months after this reading affair, I appeared in the world, all translucent and gooey. Misshapen, haphazard, blurry to the human eye—I was a medical miracle. After all, my father was fiction.
At first my mother didn't know what to feed me with, food although meaningful to most toddlers, merely puzzled my tongue. Once she started to nibble stories with me, it was clear to her I was able to grow. Food was a baby formula of sounds and breakfasts full of tiny tales. Despite managing to grow, my vision remained heavily impaired until I started to speak. Without speaking, each month, I would fade out into an anemic see-through sun.
I clung to the pages of the folk fiction my mother got pregnant with. Without noticing, I made up fables obsessively well into an awkward age—when most of my peers lost interest in stories and grew entranced by their crushes and exams. I was inconsolable about my father the fiction, my father the businessman, my father the dung beetle, my father the moon. The teacher warned my mother of my incessant lying causing my mother to bite her tongue:
"She's just a child, you know how imaginative they can be."
"Our concern is merely
about what she is exposed to at home."
As a teenager, I got addicted to all sorts of fringe fiction—I was eating my feelings away. I devoured conspiracy theories, cult manifestos and religious prophecies. I held the hand of god. I soaked up like soggy paper, determined to never stop. My mother grew worried, she tried to offer me the stories most similar to my father, folk fiction created in small villages like ours. Stories worn out by each telling, passed on until someone took a pen to their hand, betraying the folly of memory. Fiction with the round floppy edges of a first-grader's math notebook.
She thought what I was doing was cannibalistic, but there was no child like me in sight to make a mental model of, to compare parenting styles, to talk pedagogy. Desperate, she tried to revive my father, building his image anew with each word. It took me long to realize my father was as much a fiction on a page as he was a fiction spoken out loud. Lies brought him back into our lives as much as well-meaning made-up stories did. Her intuition sniffed out my need for a father figure.
I missed him, in the space between my mother’s lips when she exhales after speaking. As if resuscitating him for me took a chunk out of her. Breastfeeding wares women out, so I guess this must too.
I missed him, in the porous sponge I imagined to be my lungs if I had any.
I missed him when I touched paper, or when I gnawed on the covers of comforting books (my frequent pacifiers).
This period was difficult even for me, both of our hormones raging, on most days she couldn’t recognize me. Big, small, full of pimples, riddled with splinters, bald, in armor, covered in tattoos or penciled in a suit. I was undecided. Yet at 17, it was expected of me, by my school principal, my mother, and the rest of the fleshy world around me to set on the story I plan on being. To just show some darn consistency.
In most of the futures that awaited me I was unemployable or stuck in entry level jobs that were who I was for the time being. The world has no place for the untrustworthy kin of fiction, not in customer service, not in hospitality, not even in publishing.
Yet I was everyone you could have imagined me to be and I still am.